Monday, August 29, 2016

Ishi,
the Last Yahi Indian Speaker (center),
at an Unveiling of an Indian Monument,

Lincoln
Park, Alameda, California, 1914

California Historical Society

In the early part of the twentieth century—following the near
annihilation of California’s Native Americans the century before—a singular
event occurred. In many ways, Natives and non-Natives still experience the
impact of this event on communities across the state.

In the summer of 1911, at a slaughterhouse corral near the town of
Oroville in northern California’s Butte County, a middle-aged man—most likely
of the Yahi tribe native to the Deer Creek region—was discovered in a state of
exhaustion and emaciation. The sole survivor of a small band of Indians thought
to have been extinguished during the California Indian Wars, he had come out of
isolation in the mountains.

This “unprecedented behavior,” Theodora Kroeber
observed in her book Ishi in Two Worlds:
A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (1916), had resulted from crossing “certain physical and psychic limits” from
which Ishi—as he
was simply called, from the Yahi word for man—“made choices
as courageous and enlightened as the scope of his opportunities permitted.”

Kroeber was
the wife of the famous anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, under whose care, along
with that of Thomas T. Waterman, Ishi was
placed. Ishi would live the remainder of his life adapting
to the twentieth century at the University of California’s Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco. There he was closely studied for five years until
his death in March 1916.

To the museum’s anthropologists, staff, and visitors, Ishi imparted his
language, survival and crafts skills, culture, and personal beliefs. To them—and to us even today—his life brought new understandings of
Native American heritage in the context of and in contrast to twentieth-century
urban life.

Ishi Salmon
Fishing on Deer Creek, May 1914

Courtesy of Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley

Native and
non-Native scholars, artists, cultural and educational leaders, and community
members continue to explore these understandings. At the California Historical Society,
for example:

·In conjunction with our year-long 2015 exhibition
celebrating the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair, the projected light artist Ben
Wood examined Ishi’s life within the context of the fair, which Ishi attended. Wood’s
piece Lopa Pikta (Rope Picture), a
sound and light installation, was displayed in the windows of the California
Historical Society after dark. See http://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/exhibitions/past_exhibitions/illumination/.

Ben Wood, Lopa Pikta (Rope Picture), 2015

California Historical
Society

·Beginning this July CHS offers two Native
American exhibitions. One examines the impact of California’s only major Indian
War (the Modoc War of 1872–73). The other features contemporary tintype
portraits by photographer Ed Drew of members of the
Klamath, Modoc, and Pit River Paiute tribes, some of them
descendants of Modoc War survivors. See http://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/exhibitions/current_exhibitions.

·This month in Los Angeles, and this October
in San Francisco, CHS invites author Benjamin Madley to speak about his newly
published book An American Genocide: The
United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. As the New York Times began its review, “The state of sunshine and
pleasure is drenched in the blood of Indians.” See http://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/exhibitions/events_calendar.html.

Benjamin Madley Discussing His Book (right) at Skylight Book in Los Angeles,
May 2016

Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA,
University of California, Los Angeles

Forty-six
years ago today, a rally to protest the Vietnam War turned deadly. Sponsored by
the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, an antiwar activist group, the
Chicano Moratorium march in Los Angeles drew up to 30,000 people eager to give
their voice to the war’s injustices. Community members, families, artists, and
students marched through East Los Angeles from Belvedere Park to what was then called
Laguna Park.

During the rally,
stores burned, over 100 people were arrested, many were injured, and four people
were killed, including the prominent Chicano Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar.

The
moratorium has been considered the largest anti-Vietnam War demonstration by a
minority group and the largest demonstration of the Chicano Movement of the
late 1960s and 1970s. And while the moratorium resulted in loss of life, it also gave
birth to continued expression of Latino political power, including a murals
movement that still resonates today.

Below we
look at images of the Chicano Moratorium and examples of Chicano murals that
were created in its wake.

Together with LA
Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles, the California Historical Society is
developing an exhibition and related publication about contested Chicano
Murals, part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA project sponsored by
the Getty and Bank of America.

Friday, August 26, 2016

On September
4, 1781, forty-four Hispanic men, women, and children of Native American,
African, and European descent departed from Mission San Gabriel Arcángel accompanied by two
mission priests and four soldiers. Los Pobladores (the settlers) walked nine
miles to a location on the banks of the Porciúncula (Los Angeles
River). There they established El Pueblo de la Reyna de los Angeles (the town
of the Queen of the Angels).

Every year since 1981, the City of Los Angeles commemorates this
official founding by recreating the journey of Los Pobladores along the
historic route they traveled two hundred years earlier. On Saturday, August 27,
2016, walkers and bikers celebrate the city’s 235th birthday. Their journey
begins at Mission San Gabriel and culminates at El Pueblo Historical Monument, a
44-acre park in downtown Los Angeles near the site of Los Pobladores’ original
destination.

This year, as part of the city’s founding celebration, the
California Historical Society and LA as Subject present the exhibition “History
Keepers: Traversing Los Angeles” at El Tranquilo Gallery on Olvera Street, El
Pueblo. In this exhibition, unique and curious objects from around the region bring our multifaceted
city to us. Each tells a story about
Los Angeles—how we move through the city and how the city moves through us.

Telling Los Angeles’ History through Artifacts

Featuring
objects and images that depict landscapes; urban planning and architecture;
travel, tourism, and mapping; airways, railways, roadways, and freeways;
tunnels, canals, and bridges; cityscapes and streetscapes, “History Keepers:
Traversing Los Angeles” is a cornucopia of the region’s geographical,
environmental, cultural, and historical landscape. Should we ever forget or
lose sight of our past, we need only return to these primary source materials
to discover again where we came from and perhaps even where we are going.

Knife and
Trunk of Tiburcio Vásquez, c. mid-1800s

San
Fernando Valley Historical Society

In the mid-1800s the legendary, controversial Tiburcio Vásquez—son of
a prominent Californio family—traversed the passes and foothills of the state,
robbing and terrorizing inhabitants and romancing others. Remembered for his
womanizing and crimes purportedly committed in the name of justice for his
people, the bandido/outlaw—and folk hero to some—traveled with this trunk
packed with his personal effects. This knife is all that remains of its
contents.

In 1932 a German PhD student arrived in Los Angeles. Anton Wagner
wanted to determine how this American city and its environs had become a
booming metropolis of two million people from a small, dusty
mid-nineteenth-century town. Wagner researched the region’s history, critically
examined its geography, interviewed its civic and business leaders, and covered
the area of greater Los Angeles on foot.

Lantern Slide, c.
1890–1950

Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum

Like other forms of
“armchair travel,” viewers of magic lantern images were transported to
destinations around Los Angeles without ever leaving their seats. Long before
Technicolor or Kodachrome, they gathered in darkened spaces and saw Los Angeles
in vibrant, even surreal, color. It was a trick accomplished with limelight, lenses, and
hand-tinted glass slides, but to a nineteenth-century audience it might as well
have been magic. Indeed, the projector responsible for these proto-cinematic
effects came to be known as the magic lantern.

Accidents, traffic jams, and car chases
are accepted realities for modern Angelenos. As we drive across the city, we
often rely on reports from helicopters to alert us to traffic conditions. In
this photographic print published in the Los Angeles Times on December 9, 1953, Los Angeles Police
Chief William H. Parker and pilot Joe Mashman hover over the Civic Center. They
are testing out the helicopter’s potential use by the Los Angeles
Police Department (LAPD) in directing city traffic—particularly, as the accompanying
caption notes, “along the freeways.”

“Sunset Junction” Footage, 1927

Automobile Club of Southern California
Archives

Click on the link above to view rare footage by Auto
Club of Southern California engineer Ernest East of the junction of Sunset and
Santa Monica Boulevards in 1927. As the film shows, traversing the city’s streets afoot and by car in
the early years of the automotive age was not for the timid.

Klaus Staeck, Und Neues Leben Blüht Aus Den Ruinen

(And New Life Blossoms from the
Ruins), 1980

Center for
the Study of Political Graphics

This poster features an image of Los
Angeles’s Four-Level Interchange, connecting the 101 and 110 Freeways, in
northern downtown Los Angeles. Officially the Bill Keene Memorial Interchange,
it is the first stack interchange ever built. Since the 1950s it has become an
iconic international symbol of modern urban development, calling attention to
the way urbanization and car culture around the world too often result in
destruction of neighborhoods, pollution, and other threats to the environment.

Thursday, August 25, 2016

Tintypes, or ferrotypes, were the Polaroids
of the nineteenth century. The small metal photographs were processed immediately
after exposure, offering more-or-less instant gratification for the people
pictured.

Of course, what constituted quick
results in the nineteenth century might seem excruciatingly slow to us today. With
exposures of several seconds—too long for most people to comfortably hold a
smile—it is no wonder that so many of the faces we see in tintypes seem to stare
into the camera with a steely resolve (to stay still, no doubt).

For photographers, the process was not
instantaneous at all. In fact it
involved quite a bit of labor and skill. First a lacquered sheet of iron—not
tin as the name suggests—had to be carefully coated with a collodion solution
containing light-sensitive silver salts immediately before the plate was
exposed in a camera. Then, the still-wet plate had to be quickly removed from
the camera and processed in a series of chemical baths and water. The process
was cumbersome, with all the equipment needed on site, including a large camera
with a tripod and a dark room (or tent). Action shots were certainly out the
question.

Tintype
Camera (attributed to Benton Pixley Stebbins, 1825–1906)

Courtesy of National Museum of American
History, Smithsonian Institution

Tintypes had limitations, but none of
them prevented the medium from becoming extremely popular for portraiture in the
second half of the nineteenth century. They were laterally reversed—a consequence
of the direct positive process—but that meant people got a view of themselves that
matched their familiar mirror image. The limited tonal range from gray to black
could be improved with hand tinting.

Tintype galleries also did what they
could to flatter sitters, posing them next to columns or in front of painted
backdrops that served to underscore, or elevate, the sitter’s class status. Tintypes
were also relatively inexpensive and durable, compared to earlier photographs
like daguerreotypes and ambrotypes. One of the tintypist’s most popular markets
was among Civil War soldiers who commonly sent home portraits of themselves to
loved ones.

Civil
War–era Tintypes

Courtesy PBS Newshour

The California Historical Society has
numerous tintypes in its collection, many of them picturing San Franciscans seated
in portrait studios with all the usual props. The rare few were taken out of
doors, or carefully staged with clever backdrops to look like it.

In August 2009 my
beloved and I were vacationing in San Francisco when suddenly I was presented
with an idea . . . almost as if it was an order being given. . . . “Go to
Yosemite National Park,” it said. Being from New Jersey, and never having been
to California or a national park before, I had no idea what we were in for.

This
is the final blog in our series “A Mirror of Us: CHS Celebrates the National
Park Service Centennial.” We chose to title our series “A Mirror of Us” for its
slight play on words. The series began and now ends with the above photo of
early tourists in Yosemite having their photo taken at Mirror Lake, a
spectacular setting with selfie-like appeal.

Mirror Lake, Yosemite

California Historical Society

“A
Mirror of Us” also sought to show how the national parks have been a mirror of
the times, environmentally, socially, and politically. No park came into being
easily, and many presaged social and environmental battles that continue today.
No park has been immune to issues affecting mainstream society.

In
1864 Yosemite was the first place to be set aside and preserved by the federal
government when, at the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed the
Yosemite Grant. Later efforts by John Muir and others led to the park earning
full National Park status on October 1, 1890. It didn’t take long for tourists
to discover Yosemite—and the pilgrimage was on.

The
creation of the park did not come without controversy, however. From its
earliest days of discovery by Americans in the early 1850s, Yosemite was
emblematic of the often tragic course of westward expansion, when its original
native people, the Ahwahneechee, were driven out of
Yosemite Valley to make way for American settlement.

During
the 1910s Yosemite became the site of one of the greatest environmental battles
of all time—one that remains controversial today: the flooding of the park’s
Hetch Hetchy Valley by the City of San Francisco.

And
later, in 1970, as the streets of the nation were erupting in protest, Stoneman
Meadow in Yosemite Valley was the site of an all-out riot between young
“hippies” and park police who differed in their opinions about what constituted
appropriate ways of enjoying the valley’s sublime scenery.

Confrontation between Rangers and
Hippies, July 4 weekend, 1970

Still
from CBS News Archive film; courtesy of Kerry Tremain

No
National Park exists in a vacuum.

It
is a simple fact, though, that people have treasured Yosemite National Park
since long before it obtained National Park status. To celebrate Yosemite, and
the National Park Service Centennial, we share images of Yosemite National Park
and memories of people simply and joyously celebrating there.

Two Women in Yosemite National Park, date unknown

California
Historical Society

My license plate in
Kentucky reads: YOSMTE. It is my happy, soul-satisfying refuge from the world.

Ann Jones, “Working on Five
Generations,” Inspiring Generations

Bridalveil Falls, 2014

Courtesy
of Alison Moore

As we approached
the park, the landscape became more and more beautiful. I have never
experienced anything quite like it. And once we entered the park I was blown
away.

Tom Caverly, “Unexpected Amazement,”
Inspiring Generations

Panoramic View of Tourists,
Yosemite National Park, c. 1917

California Historical Society

Half Dome, Evening,
2014

Courtesy of Alison Moore

Half Dome is more a
beloved friend than a granite monolith keeping watch over the Valley. One year
I climbed up his back just to see from his point of view. Yosemite is a place
more dear than Grandma’s house . . . . I simply need it to stay alive.

Rebecca Waddell, “The Day I
Discovered Ashes,” from Inspiring Generations

Yosemite Visitors atop
Glacier Point, date unknown

California Historical Society

Tuolumne River,
Tuolumne Meadows, 2014

Courtesy of Alison Moore

The air in the high
mountains is so clean, and the trees, grass, birds and flowers are fascinating
beyond description . . . . Beautiful flowers bloom in a stream of icy water. I
feel only gratitude. I want to bring you and our friends here, and I will.

Chiura Obata to Haruko Obata, 1927,
from Obata’s Yosemite

Yosemite Indian Squaw, 107 Years Old, date unknown

California
Historical Society

After a few months
of living in Yosemite I decided I never wanted to leave. I met a Yosemite
Indian woman, an Ahwahneechee who was a direct descendant of Chief Tenaya. We
married and had two children. We all love Yosemite. It is a park of our
culture, our ceremonies . . . . We are fighting to protect and preserve it for
the future of humanity. Ah Ho. All my relations.

Tom Vasquez, “Yosemitebear,” Inspiring
Generations

Bridal Couple, 2014

Courtesy of Alison Moore

Group of Women at Camp
Curry, Yosemite National Park, date unknown

California Historical Society

I live in Yosemite . . . . It’s not
that I am ashamed. No, quite the contrary—I am proud to call Yosemite my home.
However, you drop the Y-bomb, and suddenly the pleasant vapidity of
get-to-know-you banter veers down an ever-predictable and utterly confounding
path.

“Wow.” (The first word of response is always “wow.”)
…”What’s that like?”

About Us

The California Historical Society, founded in 1871, is a nonprofit organization with a mission to inspire and empower people to make California's richly diverse past a meaningful part of their contemporary lives.